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RMG has been a driving force behind Harper&rsquo;s electoral success, but now finds itself in the crosshairs of a potential scandal involving alleged Elections Act violations.

Conservative sources say Stewart Braddick, the political mastermind behind RMG, is an organizer who has toiled endlessly in the political trenches. (Facebook)

By Allan Woods and Tonda MacCharlesOttawa Bureau

Tues., Feb. 28, 2012

OTTAWA—Stewart Braddick knows Brian Mulroney as well as former premiers Gordon Campbell and Mike Harris. He has worked for all of them.

He also knows Stephen Harper and has become an influential strategist behind the federal Conservative party’s electoral inroads.

If you’ve ever taken a call asking for donations to the Tories, Braddick, a political marketing operative at RMG — The Responsive Marketing Group — probably knows something about you, too.

The Toronto-based company specializes in identifying and making contact with segments of the population for charities or political parties. An American branch of the firm, Target Outreach, also did $300,000 worth of work for the Republican National Committee, according to OpenSecrets.org, a website that tracks financial data about U.S. politics.

RMG has been a driving force behind Harper’s electoral success, but now finds itself in the crosshairs of a potential scandal involving alleged Elections Act violations.

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Former employees at one of RMG’s call centres in Thunder Bay say they may have been asked to send voters in closely fought ridings to the wrong polling stations during the last federal election, helping to give Harper’s Tories a majority government.

The company had contracts with nearly 100 Conservative candidates in the last election for advertising, “election surveys” or “other research.”

The Conservatives deny any involvement in alleged voter-suppression activities, saying the party was focused only on getting out the votes of their supporters.

The allegation from former RMG call operators, unveiled in the Toronto Star, shines a spotlight on RMG and Braddick, who has spent more than two decades scouting out fertile territory for right-wing politicians in Canada and the United States.

Braddick, on vacation, declined comment when contacted by the Star. Other company spokespeople did not respond.

Conservative sources, who spoke only on condition of anonymity, say Braddick is an organizer who has toiled endlessly in the political trenches.

One said he’s “a very bright guy . . . very straight-up guy. Politics is his life and always has been.”

Another was less flattering about Braddick and RMG, and predicted that more may yet be revealed about the company’s role in the past election.

The Vancouver native started as a young member of the former Progressive Conservative party, working on Mulroney’s campaign and then in his office, organizing domestic and international travel.

His name first hit the headlines in January 1997, when, as a political aide to the British Columbia Liberals, he was found to have paid $230,000 to a printing company with close party ties for a direct-mail campaign critical of the NDP government.

He turned up a few months later in Mike Harris’s office, as director of organization charged with being the link between the Ontario premier’s office and the public.

Former NDP Leader Howard Hampton said at the time the Ontario Tories, not the public, should be paying for “someone to do the kind of partisan dirty tricks that Mr. Braddick is identified with.”

Harris came to his employee’s defence, saying the resignation saved both Campbell and the party from political embarrassment.

“That kind of honour is the kind we respect in Ontario,” the then premier said.

Braddick shifted to the private sector after that but continued working for the Conservative cause. Twelve years ago, he co-founded Toronto’s Navigator Ltd., a high-octane political consulting group. Within a couple of years, Braddick had moved on to RMG.

He has been involved with a string of losing political campaigns: Tom Long’s failed run for the leadership of the Canadian Alliance, Belinda Stronach’s unsuccessful 2004 bid against Stephen Harper to lead the federal Tories, and Jane Pitfield’s unsuccessful challenge of David Miller to become mayor of Toronto.

Still, Braddick’s employment with RMG coincided with the company’s growth as well as the political successes of Harper’s Conservatives.

“The Reform Party and the Alliance had had a chronic problem of losing all voter identification data acquired during campaigns,” wrote Tom Flanagan, a one-time chief of staff to Harper, in his book, Harper’s Team.

In early spring 2003 RMG president Michael Davis contacted Flanagan, and gave an impressive pitch on how his company and the party should work together. Very quickly, says Flanagan, the party “gave all our voter-contact work to that company.”

All the information gathered on voters went into the Constituency Information Management System, or CIMS, the Conservatives’ vast database of voting habits, party membership and financial contributions.

“Our relationship with RMG linked nicely with our development of CIMS. RMG was already familiar with a CIMS-style system because of the work they had done with the Ontario PCs, and CIMS provided a receptacle for the hundreds of thousands of records generated by RMG’s large-scale calling programs.”

After the Reform and Alliance parties merged, Harper had to move quickly to mount the 2004 election campaign. He didn’t win but Flanagan wrote RMG’s direct voter contact work was key to electoral gains that snowballed in successive campaigns.

In the 2011 campaign, 94 Conservative candidates paid for RMG’s services. The NDP contends RMG is not freelancing on its political scripting for voter contact calls. It points to a contract that Conservative MP Laurie Hawn’s campaign had showing RMG and the party work hand-in-glove on telephone scripts to be read to voters. The contract also tasks RMG with gathering email addresses and transferring all the data into the Conservative CIMS database.

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